Thursday, December 31, 2015

I dislike Annie Get Your Gun not because it’s an bad film (though it is),
nor because Betty Hutton as Annie roars out her songs like a wounded heifer
(though she does), nor even because there isn’t a comma in the title (because
it needs one) but because the basic picture of Annie Oakley is all wrong.
Hutton, taking the role Ethel Merman had in the Broadway show, plays her as a
hillbilly tomboy, a sort of sharpshootin’ Doris Day-style Calamity Jane, and
it’s quite wrong. Oakley was a demure, proper person who skillfully projected a
persona of “little miss”, even as a married woman in her thirties, but she was
never less than a Victorian lady in all matters of propriety and dress.

The real Annie with her gun

It is true that I am biased. I don’t
care for musicals at all. I find them inherently silly and don’t like the style
of music (though I love opera and have no problem with musical drama as such).
But these tawdry Hollywood versions of garish Broadway shows are painful. I
only watched it because of its vaguely Western subject matter, out of duty.

Doris Day, Judy Garland, Ginger Rogers were all considered

The love of Oakley’s life was the
marksman Frank Butler (1847 – 1926), who fell for her when she beat him in a shooting
contest, invited her into his show and soon gave her all the limelight. They
were married and worked in variety together for years before joining Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. In the musical, they join Cody right away. Butler
(Howard Keel) is a flashy Tom Mix-style dude cowboy who takes umbrage when
bested by the young girl and goes off in a huff to join Pawnee Bill’s show. He
and Annie love each other but are kept apart for most of the movie and Annie
goes to Europe alone. There is no sign of Annie’s rival Lillian Smith either;
Annie gets all the glory and meets all the crowned heads.

Frank Butler

Louis Calhern is Buffalo Bill. As a
singer, he makes a great actor. (The others can sing but act poorly). Calhern
did at least look the part; he was tall, distinguished and
aristocratic-looking. It was to have been Frank Morgan but Morgan died just as
filming began. Calhern was in fact in a proper Western as well as this junk: he
had second billing in the excellent Anthony Mann-directed Devil’s Doorway the same year. he is really the best thing about Annie Get Your Gun.

Yes, well, if you like that sort of thing...

The Indians are portrayed offensively,
in a 1950 ‘comic’ way. They are greedy and coarse. Sitting Bull (J Carrol
Naish) introduces himself with an “Ug”. He provides the money for the show,
investing revenue from oilwells he has (I know, but that is the least of the
sillinesses of the storyline).

A non-comic Sitting Bull

Buffalo Bill’s manager, a principal
part, is one Charlie Davenport (a fictional character) played by Kennan
Wynn. He tells Bill that despite the European tour the show is broke. They hatch
a plot to merge with Pawnee Bill’s show to pay their debts, not knowing that
Pawnee Bill (Edward Arnold) is broke too and wants to merge to get his hands on Buffalo Bill’s supposed
wealth. Or something. The plot is too daft to recount further. This business does at least
give rise to one of the few good lines in the screenplay (by Sidney Sheldon and
Herbert and Dorothy Fields) when the mutual impecuniousness is discovered and someone says, “They haven’t got as much money
as we haven’t got.”

Butler & Oakley, Hollywood-Broadway style

For a big-budget musical there is
surprisingly little spectacle in the Wild West show, the ‘biggest’ scenes being
one where Annie saves the Deadwood stage by shooting Indians (she didn’t) and
the finale as riders surround the happy couple.

Yawn

You may like this movie if you like
colorful musicals. It has at least There's no business like show business and Anything you can do in it. With Irving Berlin (replacing Jerome Kern) and Rodgers and
Hammerstein involved (and Busby Berkeley directed quite a few scenes but they
were excised or reshot) it couldn’t be all bad, but it could be mostly bad, and
it was. As a Western, of course, it’s nowhere, but you can’t fairly blame it
for that (though I do).

Thursday, December 24, 2015

Bands of outlaws were meat and drink to
the Hollywood Western, and if they contained brothers and robbed trains and
banks, so much the better. The Reno brothers were probably the first but of
course the James gang and the Youngers often appeared on the screen, and later
examples such as the Daltons were pretty popular too. The last in the line were
the Doolins, offshoots of the Daltons, who marauded in Oklahoma in the 1890s.
They had a variety of names, The Wild Bunch, of course, (but then many outlaws
had that soubriquet) but also The Oklahombres and The Oklahoma Long Riders (for
the long dusters they wore).

Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy and
Randolph Scott all had a go at being Bill Doolin. William Doolin (1858 – 96)
was a cowboy who got into a shooting scrape in Coffeyville on July 4th 1892 and
then joined up with the Dalton gang. Rumors persist that Doolin was “the sixth
man” holding the horses in an alley at the fatal Coffeyville raid in 1892. Emmett
Dalton, the only survivor of the raid, never disclosed who the man was. Doolin
then formed his own gang. From 1893 to ’95 Doolin and his cronies (who included
the teenage girls Cattle Annie and Little Britches) went on a spree of crime,
including the so-called Battle of Ingalls, until Doolin’s career finally came
to an abrupt end caused by the shotgun of Heck Thomas.

The real Bill Doolin, after Heck Thomas had finished with him. Ouch.

Hollywood Doolins are, naturally, misunderstood
goodies. Directors and screenplay writers dipped their very broad brushes in
copious quantities of whitewash to paint a picture of Robin Hood-like social
bandits driven unwillingly into crime by force of circumstance. In this movie
Randolph Scott wants to go straight and settle down on a ranch with his true
love but is pretty well obliged to take up robbing again by his cronies. “Forced
to seek friends outside the law, then chosen as their leader.”

Randolph Scott as a noble Doolin forced to rob

The movie has good credentials. Gordon
Douglas directed it for Columbia, probably the most proficient studio at B-Westerns. Douglas was a workaday director who churned out some pretty ordinary
stuff, from 1944 to 1975, but also made quite a few excellent Westerns. The Doolins was in fact only his second.
The year after, he did The Nevadan,
also with Scott, which was actually very good. The dark, intense Only the Valiant with Gregory Peck, the colorful Bowie bipic The Iron Mistress with Alan Ladd, the remake of Stagecoach, two nice pictures with Clint
Walker, Fort Dobbs and Yellowstone Kelly, two later actioners, Rio Conchos and Barquero, all these oaters were not at all bad, and Douglas
deserves credit for directing solid, well-made (if B) Westerns.

Gordon Douglas

It’s pretty actiony, with Yak Canutt
doing the stunts and Jock Mahoney standing in for Randy. The story and
screenplay were by Kenneth Gamet, who had done an outstanding job on Coroner Creek the year before and who wrote
six movies for Randolph Scott. He was a pro.

The music is by Paul Sawtell, and
Charles Lawton Jr., one of my favorite Western cinematographers, did an
excellent job with the Alabama Hills, Lone Pine locations. Some of the photography
is remarkably good, enough to make you sit up and take notice. If you watch it,
look out, for example, for the night descent of horses in the dust, or an
aerial shot of swirling horses.

Excellent cinematography

And the cast is strong: John Ireland as
Bitter Creek and Noah Beery Jr. as Little Bill are among the outlaws, George
Macready is the lawman, and we get Louis Allbritton as Rose of Cimarron (Bitter
Creek’s girl) and Dona Drake as a feisty Cattle Annie (there’s no sign of
Little Britches).

The Doolin gang

So all in all it’s a professional, tight
Western with much in its favor.

Randy dies on screen for only the fifth (and
last) time in his career. Good bandit he may be but he can’t be seen to get
away with robbin’ and shootin’.

Monday, December 21, 2015

PBS has put out many documentaries on
semi-mythical figures of the old West, such as Billy the Kid and General Custer,
for example, and in 2006 it was the turn of perhaps the most iconic train- and
bank-robber of them all, Jesse James.

It was a film in the American Experience series and this one
was produced, written and directed by Mark Zwonitzer, who has also contributed
to and/or directed many others on different aspects of American history.

Mark Zwonitzer

Like all these programs, it’s sober,
serious and unsensational, which, given the hype surrounding the name of Jesse
James and the absurd layers of myth that have been piled upon him, is a good
thing.

In fact it starts with the mythic aspect
of James’s career, the idea that he was a common man’s champion against
rapacious capitalism, on the side of the ‘little people’, willing to stand up
against oppression, a sort of American Robin Hood. Most movie portrayals of him
have underlined this aspect, of course, it being easier to have your central
character (usually played by a Hollywood star) as a noble hero rather than a
juvenile delinquent who became a sociopathic hoodlum.

Worth a look

The good news, and it’s very good news,
is that one of the talking heads in the documentary is TJ Stiles. Mr. Stiles
has written the very best book of all on Jesse James, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (2002). Some biographers
have written what turns out to be the definitive life of their subjects. It may
be that in a generation or two new facts will emerge and an even better life of
Jesse James will be written, but it’s hard to imagine now. Jesse James is so deeply researched, so well written and so
authoritative that really, you don’t need any other book. The same can be said
of Casey Tefertiller on Wyatt Earp, Roger DeArment on Bat Masterson, Don
Russell on Buffalo Bill, Robert Utley on Sitting Bull, and several others. These
lives are, well, it.

TJ Stiles

The film starts in 1864 with a
sixteen-year-old Jesse going off to join a guerrilla band, the regular
Confederate forces having been already driven out of Missouri. We are told that
slaves accounted for half the James family’s wealth. Hollywood Jameses often
denounce slavery and declare they have never owned a slave but that was bunkum.
The savagery of the conflict is underlined. ‘Trophies’ were taken and the psychopath
Bill Anderson, for example, rode with scalps and ears attached to his horse’s
harness. The murder of disarmed men at Centralia, in which Jesse James took
part, is very rarely mentioned in film treatments but was shockingly real.

But at this time Jesse James was
virtually an unknown. It was really his post-war brigandry, in particular the
robbery in Gallatin in December 1869, that made his name news. And James was
skillful at the manipulation of the media of the day. You get the idea from the
film that in fact that was what he was seeking – attention. Like a spoilt boy
he desperately wanted people to notice him. He boasted of the killing of the bank
teller in Gallatin (though in fact he had murdered the wrong man). James’s huge
ally, the alcoholic editor JN Edwards, was an unrepentant Rebel and portrayed
Jesse James as totally innocent of all crimes. Jesse was religious, kind to
animals, and all the rest. Many people believed this. The film underlines the
support James got from the populace: after train robberies it was easy for him
and his accomplices to get fresh horses to outrun pursuit.

Jesse Woodson James (1847 - 1882)

The media profile of Jesse James grew as
Republicans increasingly made him a campaign issue. It’s really quite a modern
story in many ways, with politics and the media latching on to an issue and
making headway out of it.

And James himself appears to have been increasingly
unable to distinguish the ‘legend’ from the reality. He loved reading newspaper
stories about himself. He became his image. “Jesse James began to inhabit the
myth that Edwards created.”

A key change point in the whole story
occurred when the Pinkertons got involved. Allan Pinkerton made it a personal
mission to track down and capture the James gang. And despite the catastrophic
raid on the James farmhouse with its murderous firebomb attack, which turned
even neutrals into pro-James partisans, the inexorable pursuit ground the Jameses
down. In a time when regular official police forces were incompetent or
downright non-existent, it was the Pinkertons who provided a professional detective
force.

The later gangs that Jesse James put
together were no war veterans. They were just low-grade criminals. Even JN
Edwards began to cool in his support. When politics shifted and ex-Confederates
took power in Missouri and even they were determined to put an end to the
depredation of the James gang, Jesse’s time had passed.

Governor Crittenden actively conspired to
kill a citizen. It worked. The killing of Jesse James, which was instantly to
become the subject of an enormously popular ballad and huge press interest
(Oscar Wilde commented on the sale of James possessions) finally put an end to
a criminal career which had in fact already all but petered out. But it didn’t
put an end to the legend. Far from it.

This documentary says little new or revealing
about Jesse James, but it does sum up well the story and go a long way to
throwing the cold light of reality on the myth. It’s worth a look if it comes
on. You can get it on DVD too.

Saturday, December 19, 2015

At first sight this movie looks like a late-1940s
black & white cops & robbers drama, and purists won't consider it a Western at all. The opening frame shows (then)
modern trucks in a city street and we see John Ireland in suit and tie. Is he a
hoodlum? He looks like one (but then he always did). Is he a cop? No, he’s a
private eye. He’s being paid by a father to find a son’s murderer. So you think
we’re in for a classic noir. And we
are, in some ways, but as soon as the plot gets past the first scenes, and the
band of ten goodies, baddies and in-betweenies ride out of Calexico/Mexicali into the desert, we realize
we’re in for a Western. A contemporary Western, but a Western.

In fact the goodies (Randolph Scott, an
Indian, the girl) wear cowboy hats while the others wear more modern headgear. Symbolic, huh.

The pedigree of The Walking Hills is pretty good: produced by Harry Joe Brown (with
Scott), written by Alan Le May, directed by John Sturges and starring Scott, Ireland,
Edgar Buchanan and Arthur Kennedy, with Ella Raines as the female lead, the
movie shaped up to be good from the get-go. And it is. Former theater actor and
director Brown moved to Hollywood and in the 1930s directed for Universal
first, then Paramount, before moving into producing. He partnered up with
Randolph Scott and together they were responsible for some first-class movies,
notably the Budd Boetticher-directed Westerns of the late 1950s.

Classy contemporary Western

Le May is of course very well known as a
novelist. The Searchers and The Unforgiven, both absolutely superb
Westerns, were based on his stories, and he wrote original screenplays for
other oaters such as North West Mounted Police, San Antonio and Cheyenne. He also wrote TV Western
shows. He did an excellent job on The
Walking Hills, bringing in tension, developing character and pulling off
the difficult trick of balancing a fairly static, almost play-like ensemble
with Western action.

Director Sturges will be always honored
in the halls of Valhalla (whither he departed in 1992) for The Magnificent Seven, one of the greatest Westerns of all time, of
course. But don’t forget he also did Bad Day at Black Rock, so he knew all about ensemble pieces of tense character
interaction bursting into violence. He also directed one of the most famous
Westerns of all time, Gunfight at the OK Corral. It is true that he is 'credited' with some downright
bad oaters (Sergeants 3, The Hallelujah Trail, Chino) but all in all his record was
pretty damn good. I am a great fan of Escape from Fort Bravo, for example, and Joe Kidd.

John Sturges

As to the cast, Randolph Scott was
developing into a superb (and much underrated) actor, capable of great
subtlety, transmitting a persona of stoicism, compassion and authority. He was
ideally suited to intelligent Westerns. In this movie he is an ex-rodeo star more concerned with his mare in foal than either girl or gold. He is quiet and restrained but steely when it's called for. Two moments in particular show his strength: when the PI (Ireland) shoots a young man, member of the group (Jerome Courtland), Randy says, "If that boy dies, you better hold on to your gun" in a way that seethes with menace, and when he slaps an hysterical Kennedy and knocks him to the floor, Ireland asks, "What did you do that for?" and Randy quietly rolls a cigarette and answers, "I ran out of words." Scott brilliant underplayed his parts in an almost Gary Cooperish way, and although he in fact has less screen time than some of the other actors, he dominates the picture completely. I’ve always liked John Ireland,
especially as the tough guy, and while most of his Westerns were B-movies or TV
shows, we shouldn't overlook the fact that he started off in My Darling Clementine and Red River,
two of the greatest Westerns of all time, and he was Johnny Ringo for Sturges
in OK Corral.

Kennedy and Scott play penny-ante

Regular readers of this blog, both of
them, will know what a fan I am of Edgar Buchanan, and it’s great to see him
here doing his classic act of slightly roguish but basically good old-timer,
this time a wily prospector. Arthur Kennedy is not my favorite Western actor it
must be said but his performances were certainly memorable in the likes of They Died with their Boots On, The Man from Laramie, Bend of the River and Day of the Evil Gun.

Buchanan deals

Seriously glam Ella Raines had been
signed by Howard Hawks and was Randy’s love interest in Corvette K-225. She wasn’t a Western specialist, far from it, but
she had taken the female lead opposite John Wayne in Tall in the Saddle five years before. She does a good job in Walking Hills.

Ella Raines - surprisingly, maybe, doesn't get to ride off with Randy. Randy ends up with a foal in his arms, not Ella.

So producers, writer, director, cast:
all from the top drawer.

The hills of the title are the shifting
sand dunes and if you have ever been to the White Sands in New Mexico you can
see how they would indeed appear to walk. This movie, though, was shot in Death
Valley (with 140-degree temperatures for the actors and crew), by Charles Lawton Jr., one of the great Western cinematographers, in a
glowing black & white. Some scenes of the dunes are stunningly good and the
sandstorm is remarkably well done. Lawton worked with Delmer Daves a lot (3:10 to Yuma may have been his finest
work), and for John Ford. The series of Westerns he did with Scott and Brown
and director Budd Boetticher, Comanche Station, The Tall T and Ride Lonesome, were absolutely superb.

It’s a treasure-hunting plot. The group
get wind of the whereabouts of a lost wagon train that had foundered in the
desert and was reputed to be carrying gold. The small party digging for it
includes the private eye, who is ready to abandon his employer and the mission
to get his hands on the loot. Violence explodes as rivalries and disagreements
flare. A fight in the dunes with shovels is brilliantly done.

Staged publicity still has Ella wanting to throw a punch at John Ireland

There is no doubt that the success of Warners' The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948 influenced the making of this film. Columbia got gold fever and put out the excellent Lust for Gold (with Glenn Ford and Ida Lupino) and The Walking Hills in 1949 with similar gold-hunting/skullduggery/tension plots.Josh White is in it and he is great but
he is only there to sing and dig – well, he was a Negro after all. That’s the
1940s for you. Still, the blues he sings are very, very good.

Josh White sings the blues

The bad guys get killed and the good
guys get gold, so all’s well that ends well, and Edgar Buchanan wraps it with, “Well,
that’s ‘at.”

Thursday, December 17, 2015

The comedy Western is a notoriously
difficult genre to get right. Humor is such a personal thing and trial audiences
or focus groups aren’t always good judges. What some find hilarious might be
dull as ditchwater or plain silly to you or me. A few comedy Westerns got it
right (think of ¡Three Amigos!, the Bob Hope pictures or the sublime Blazing Saddles) but many got it hopelessly wrong, and it is with
regret that I tell you that for me anyway, The
Ridiculous 6 is in the Hopelessly Wrong category.

One thing, though: parodies only work if
the object of the parody is current or strongly established in the mind of
those watching them. To me, it is an illustration of the strength of the
Western as a lasting film type that a pay-TV company can produce one in 2015
destined at a young adult audience, with pastiche figures appearing in it like
General Custer and Wyatt Earp, and with many of the clichés of the genre being
rehearsed. It shows how deeply rooted in the American psyche (and in fact world
psyche) the Western movie and its accoutrements really are. You only have to
put Earp and Custer at a poker table and drop in a remark or two about the
fastest gun in the West and dealing with Injuns, and everyone instantly
understands where you are coming from.

The
Ridiculous 6 is, by the way, aimed at a young adult
audience, specifically, I would say, a college boy audience. The humor is
earthy, sometimes crude, and the ensemble is likely to appeal to late teen or
early 20s males (girls will find it less funny). Not being, any more, a young-adult
male (Eheu fugaces labuntur anni) I must say
I found it less than hilarious and at times in fact quite repellent.

It seems to be a fairly personal
creation: Adam Sandler produced, wrote and starred in it. Mr. Sandler, you
probably know, is a comedian who moved from stand-up and Saturday Night Live into the movies. Many people find him very
funny.

The cast is strong. Nick Nolte is the
patriarchal outlaw central to the plot (the absurd sextet of the title are all
his sons by different mothers); Harvey Keitel is the smiling but murderous
saloon owner; Steve Buscemi the unfastidious barber-surgeon; John Turturro makes
up the rules of the new game of baseball as he goes along, to suit himself; Danny Trejo is, obviously, an evil bandit killer, Cicero; and
a certain Vanilla Ice plays a rapping Mark Twain. From his name I guessed that
Mr. Ice might be a popular singer and when I looked him up it turned out to be
so. Apparently, "Ice Ice Baby
was on the number #1 spot for 16 weeks” and he appeared in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II (doubtless you already knew that).

However, although the cast list contains
some famous names, the principals, the 6
themselves, are less well known (to me anyway) and both in terms of thespian
skills and the lines they have to deliver they do not exactly shine.

I only laughed once, when one of the half-brothers who had been Lincoln's bodyguard at Ford's Theater dived in front of the hero (Sandler) to take a bullet, in the best Hollywood tradition. It wasn't so much that action that I found amusing but the vision the courageous man had in his concussed state of the hero dressed as Abe and the sight of the burro morphed into Mrs. Lincoln.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Recently re-aired by PBS and also
available on DVD, The West is an
eight-part documentary produced and directed by Stephen Ives on the history of
the American West. It was written by Dayton Duncan and Geoffrey C Ward. Mr.
Ives is of course an experienced producer, writer and director and has given us
many films on different aspects of American history. Mr. Duncan has written
films on Mark Twain, America’s national parks, the Dust Bowl and Lewis &
Clark, among others, and Mr. Ward has written on Prohibition, the Roosevelts,
Abraham Lincoln, etc. Ken Burns was a “senior producer” and he needs no
introduction.

Another kind of shootin' in the West

What’s
in a name?

The first insight in The West is in the name: it was, of
course, only “the West” to the American explorers, soldiers and settlers from
the eastern states. To the Mexicans it was the north, to the French-Canadians
and British it was the south, and to the Chinese and Asian immigrants it was
the east. To the indigenous peoples, the various Indian tribes, it was none of
these things but the center of the world. The very name “the West”, then,
presupposes a certain Frederick Jackson Turner-ish ‘American imperialism’.

But American heroes are largely Western
heroes and the West exists as much in Americans’ imagination as it does in
historical fact. In a way, a peripheral region has become central to American
thinking.

Politically
correct

This film was made in the mid-1990s,
when the ‘new school’ of American history was in full spate, and indeed the
likes of Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick are among the talking
heads. So we get a good dose of the point of view of those who used to be
pretty well ignored when talking about the history of the West: women,
religious minorities, Native Americans, African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans
and so on. Of course, many of the Native Americans’ ideas on the history of the
West were also myths, just different myths.

The narrator is the splendidly-named and
slightly Henry Fonda-voiced Peter Coyote.

The
beginnings

Episode 1 is entitled The People and we start, rightly enough,
with the Indians, perhaps about 3 million of them, divided, we are told, into
seven language groups. They were traders: those who had never seen a bison wore
buffalo robes, and seashells have been found a thousand miles inland. The
Anasazi built roads and rock cities. All tribes referred to themselves as “the
people” or “human beings” or simply “we”, “us”, while foreign or new people
were called “the other” or simply “they”, “them”.

Worthy, informative, serious

Then we move to Galveston and the first incursions in the West of
the Spanish. We are given the remarkable story of Álvar Núñez
Cabeza de Vaca and then the equally astonishing Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. The Pueblo rising
comes next and a discussion of the importance of that crucial import, the
horse.

Off for a spot of conquisting

The devastating impact of smallpox,
cholera, tuberculosis, measles and diphtheria are described. These and other
diseases killed far more of the indigenous population than any army.

A chronological rather than thematic
approach is adopted, so we dot back and forth, for example returning to
Spanish-Mexican themes every now and then. Personally I would have preferred to
stick to one aspect and trace that through but that may be just me.

Large-scale

The importance of the North-West Passage
is underlined, and the fact that when Lewis and Clark were, they thought, “the
first” to meet certain native peoples, they found that these people often knew
English words (musket, powder, shot, knife, son-of-a-bitch) learnt from the
British sailors who had landed on the Pacific coast.

America, coast to coast

Episode 2 starts with William Gilpin (1813
– 1894) who is often quoted. He gives us the classic nineteenth century
American view. “The destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent.”
Yet certainly before the Louisiana Purchase and even for some time afterwards,
the ‘destiny’ of the continent was far from manifest, with the Mexican-Spanish power
from the south, the British and French in the north and the vast undefined
territory of Oregon which need not necessarily have become American at all. California
could have stayed with Mexico, or gone to France or Britain; there was no
‘inevitability’ that it would become one of the United States.

Gilpin

We have a look next at the mountain men.
There were black, Mexican, Indian and even Hawaiian trappers but Joe Meek is
used as an example. The danger of the life is highlighted, and the crucial
importance of Eastern fashion: when beaver hats gave way to silk ones, the
trade in pelts collapsed.

Joe Meek

America grabs it all

Indians were no stranger to conquest and
taking over or being pushed out of lands they felt they owned, or controlled.
We see, for example, the Lakota pushing the Kiowa out of the Black Hills. These
peoples understood the white invasion, when it came, though naturally they
resisted it to the utmost.

Texans and Mormons

The point is made that the
Mexican-Americans were an independent-minded people, often antagonistic to rule
from Mexico City, to central authority generally and even to the institutional
Catholic church.

We get Stephen Austin, Sam Houston and the
Alamo. We also get quite a lot on Narcissa Whitman and the sheer arrogance of
the assumption that anyone born West of the Mississippi was a heathen who
needed to be converted, saved and made more Eastern. I never liked her and find
it hard to lament her fate too much.

Whitman

The Mormons come next, with Brigham Young
as a Mormon Moses.

Episode 2 closes with the sonorous
assertion that in only one generation Americans had seized it all.

Indians and gold

The next part is pretty well devoted to
the Indians and the Californian gold rush. The Treaty of Fort Laramie was a
bigger affair than I previously knew. Against a background of increased
competition between Indian tribes for dwindling game, ten thousand from twelve
different tribes gathered at Laramie. But the lack of understanding on the part
of the whites was evident: in order to halt Indian-Indian conflict and protect
settlers and travelers, they wanted to draw lines on a map and talk to a single
chief. They thought that by promising fifty years of regular supplies and
confining the Indians to certain reserved areas, they could achieve their aims.
But that was fundamentally to misunderstand Indian culture and way of life.

Of course the gold rush looms large. Racial
discrimination was rife among the miners - against the Indians, of course, and
if the word genocide could be justly used anywhere it was in California, but
also against any non-American miners. With huge numbers of prospectors
competing for claims (there had been two thousand in the fall of 1849; there
were thirty-five thousand a year later) the ‘American’ miners swiftly forgot
that many of them had been immigrants or sons of immigrants. A crippling $20
monthly tax was imposed on non-American miners.

Massacres, from Mountain Meadows to the Washita

In episode 4 we go back to the Mormons. The
Mountain Meadows massacre is dealt with, and its aftermath of shallow graves
and auction of the settlers’ belongings, and we learn of Brigham Young tearing
down the makeshift memorial to the victims that had been erected, which bore
the legend Vengeance is mine, I will
repay, sayeth the Lord with the comment that vengeance had been his,
Young’s.

An early view of Mountain Meadows

After a brief excursion into the story of Juan
Cortina in 1859 we get to the Civil War in the West, particularly the
Confederate invasion of the West, Glorieta Pass and the odious Chivington. We
hear of the massacre of Sand Creek, which the ‘Reverend’ Mr. Chivington never
denied or regretted (“I stand by Sand Creek,” he said twenty years later) and
for which no one was ever punished. We go to Kansas and Missouri to hear of Jim
Lane and William Quantrill, and the 1863 attack on Lawrence (Lane’s home) with
183 men and boys killed and 185 houses burned.

And we hear of the so-called Fetterman
Massacre (the death in battle of 80 men who had disobeyed orders and rashly
charged Red Cloud’s band) which prompted Sherman to refer to “these Indians,
the enemies of our race and our civilization.” And Custer’s ‘victory’ at the
Washita, four years almost to the day after Sand Creek, when his forces charged
into a village (Black Kettle’s again: this time the chief did not survive), a
village which was flying the white flag (the American flag flying at Sand Creek
had not protected them) and cut down women and children.

You shouldn't mention Fetterman and Sand Creek in the same breath, really

Assuredly,
episode 4 is not one that recounts a glorious past for Americans.

The iron horse

Next
come the railroads, and we are reminded that they accelerated the already rapid
pace of change. The narrator tells us that “the West couldn’t be settled
without railroads and the railroads couldn’t be built without the government.”
However rich and mighty private corporations were, the huge investment and
necessary land grants required federal intervention. Massive amounts were
involved: in 1862 Congress granted $16,000 per mile for the flat rising to
$48,000 for mountainous terrain, and these sums soon doubled. 6400 acres per
mile of federal land were set aside, and when you consider the thousands and
thousands of miles of railroad constructed, this represented land the size of
whole countries.

Promontory Point, UT: historic day for the nation-building, manifest-destiny story of the West

Of
course the film concentrates on the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, and
their construction of the trans-continental line culminating in the meeting at
Promontory Point, Utah, but it also highlights the mushrooming of other
railroad companies to criss-cross the continent with rails, linking previously
remote places, speeding up communication and shifting huge tonnages of freight.

Buffalo hunters and cowboys

And all
sorts of aspects of American life were affected by the railroads, from buffalo
hunting to cattle driving. In spring 1874 Congress, alarmed by the near
extinction of the buffalo herds, passed a law restricting hunting but President
Grant vetoed it and indeed, hunters were often given free ammunition.

The romance of the buffalo hunter

Grant
himself did not say expressly that the elimination of the staple food of the
Indians would eliminate “the Indian problem” by starving them to death or
forcing them to live on hand-outs, but others did say so, explicitly. And the
cowboys, so iconic of the “Wild West” to all of us, are discussed too, average age
24, Indians, vaqueros, blacks and every other background besides.

Not the cowboy Hollywood showed us

The romance of the West

The
romantic idea of the West as a land of opportunity, ambition and success is
tempered slightly when one considers the number of farms that failed and settlers
who moved on repeatedly, the high suicide rate and the fact that 40 out of
every 1,000 whites were treated for alcoholism. And the inevitability of defeat
of the Indians by the army also came to be called into question for a brief
moment when Custer and his men were killed in 1876, the soldiers suffered
another significant defeat at the hands of the Nez Perce at White Bird Canyon
in 1877 and were driven back at Big Hole the same year. Of course with the
benefit of hindsight we know that it was only delaying the inevitable but it
didn’t seem that way to whites in the West in the 1870s. The capture of
tourists in Yellowstone illustrated perfectly the clash of cultures and, if you
like, the old and the new West.

In the
long story of perfidy and broken promises which the whites, military and
political, glibly gave to the Indians and then ignored when it was convenient
to do so, General Nelson Miles’s anger when his promise to the Nez Perce that
they may return to their homeland was overruled in Washington (or by Sherman
anyway) is less understandable when one reflects on Miles’s own rescinding of
his predecessor Crook’s promises to the Apache a few years later…

Immigrants and minorities

Episode 7
describes the extraordinary influx of whites of all kinds into the West, perhaps
5 million in the twenty years after the Civil War, swamping the few Indians
left, by a ratio of approximately 40:1 by the 1880s. It wasn’t only the Indians
who were swamped: in the 1870s Los Angeles was a small market town of perhaps
10,000 Hispanics. The arrival of the railroad and the speculators and settlers
it brought turned LA into an Anglo town with the Hispanics confined to a
barrio.

Exodusters

Some of
the immigrants to the West, especially Kansas, were black and the movement of
so-called Exodusters after the collapse of Reconstruction and withdrawal of
Federal troops from the South is a fascinating one. Encouraged by the colorful
figure of Benjamin ‘Pap’ Singleton, and rumors of $500 and free land, these
settlers sought a different kind of freedom from the one they thought they had
got from Abe Lincoln but which turned out to be illusory.

The laws
designed actively to discriminate on the basis of race and the anti-Chinese mob
violence are an especially unpleasant chapter of the history of the West. Less
offensive to modern thinkers perhaps was the outlawing of polygamy (it became a
federal crime) but there was even a move to disenfranchise Mormons. These
changes led to the exodus of some Mormons to Canada and Mexico, though the
Elders of the church accepted the inevitable, divested the Mormon church of
many of its business interests and separated church from state. Utah became the
45th state of the Union.

Various
interesting figures are discussed in this episode, such as FH Cushing, for example,
but an illuminating comment on the West is provided by Richard White when he
says that Buffalo Bill was “the one true genius the West produced” and I must
say, that nearing the end, as I am at the moment, of Don Russell’s great biography of Cody, I tend to agree. Here was a genuine plainsman (for there was nothing
fake about Cody’s frontier youth) who nevertheless made it his business
(literally) to peddle the myth of conquest: in the Wild West show it was the
Indians who did all the attacking. Buffalo Bill showed the conquerors as
victims. It was an extraordinary conjuring trick, and it worked.

True genius

The end of the West?

The last
episode opens with the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, which wad the
context for Frederick Jackson Turner’s paper on the ‘closing’ of the frontier,
and this provides the only mention in the documentary of Turner. The commentary
underlines how self-congratulatory the exposition was, and how bizarre in some
ways: a huge conquistador made of Californian prunes. 24 million people came to
visit, a quite remarkable figure when one thinks about it. By that year there
were only 63 million Americans, and 17 million of them lived west of the
Mississippi. The 1889 land rush is described, the last flurry of land-grabbing
in the West when 1.9m acres were claimed in a single day.

Buffalo Bill was considered too showy and commercial to be included;

the Wild West show set up outside

The
devastating effects of the Dawes Act are described. Many of the motives for
this legislation were admirable, at least in white Eastern eyes: turn the
Indians into decent landowners and farmers. But it was also, of course, a giant
excuse for snatching away huge tracts of the land that had been granted to them
“in perpetuity” (perpetuity had a rather short life-span in American
treaty-making terms). About 150 million acres, about two thirds of all the
land, was taken away.

The
appalling affair at Wounded Knee occurred against the background of the new
West, a populated, industrial West (the town of Butte is taken as an
illuminating example) and you are rather left with a sour taste in the mouth as
this series ends. We are all so used to the myth of the wide-open
West, land of opportunity, land of the free, where men made their own law with
six-shooters on their hips and rode off into the sunset, that when we reflect
in a sober way on the real history of the region and conclude that it really
wasn’t like that – or anyway it was rarely like that – we are left with an
abiding impression of – well, sadness.

The
series rather peters out, I thought, with the The Virginian-ish story of Wyoming schoolma'am Ethel Waxham, and you kind of expect
another episode to sum it all up. But all in all it’s an excellent documentary
that anyone interested in the West would enjoy watching.